


The Dark Side of Cadre Prime (Part 1 of 2)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [78]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Cadre Prime, Canon Compliant, Canonical Child Abuse, Child Abuse, Children, Emotional Abuse, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, Growing up in the cadre system, Hazing, Psi Corps, School, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, psychological abuse, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-09
Updated: 2017-11-09
Packaged: 2019-01-31 01:55:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Cadre Prime was the most elite of all cadres in the Corps. Those twenty-five, maybe thirty students each year - out of the whole Corps of millions - were hand-picked for the most prestigious jobs upon reaching adulthood. They became high-level administrators. They became teachers. They became whatever they wanted.But they had also survived a system that was, at times, uniquely abusive.Now that I've spent nearly 200k words inBehind the Glovesintroducing readers to telepath culture, I begin also to discuss some things that went Wrong.No nation is ever perfect. Telepaths are no different - humans are humans, and humans are imperfect beings. Humans fail. This is the lesson Bester takes away from his experiences with abuse in school.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	The Dark Side of Cadre Prime (Part 1 of 2)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

I hate that I have to write this essay, but this is a crucially important subject to introduce as we move into the second phase of _Behind the Gloves_ \- a deeper look at law, a deeper look at telepath culture, a deeper look into the _complex._

And this needs to be discussed before we get to all that. There's no way around it.

So. We discuss child abuse.

I cannot defend it. I will not defend it. I will do my best to _explain_ it (when I can), I will do my best to _contextualize_ it, but I cannot defend it.

Discipline in the Corps was always strict, and Cadre Prime took that to extremes. But beyond that, the students of Cadre Prime also suffered unique, bizarre, arbitrary, and even at times _ritualized_ abuse at the hands of teachers - abuse that at times bears little to no connection to the larger, "true" values of the Corps in a deeper sense.

Bester himself figures this out, as he watches the graduation "ritual" with horror, and this discovery is a pivotal point in his life.

So I need to discuss the abuse. Not defend it. _Behind the Gloves_ , as stated in [the introduction](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590), stands as Bester's defense: legally, socially, and historically.

I am defending _him_. And I am defending the Corps. Not his abusers, who distort the values of the Corps and hurt children.

\-----

First, there is the question: _why?_

Why in creation would Cadre Prime, out of all the cadres in the Corps, have such "traditions" and rituals? Why would they, alone of any cadre, have "monitors" (called by students "the Grins") - who were actually the teachers and nannies and even the cadre nurse, dressed up in terrifying costumes? (The values that the teachers, as "monitors," sought to teach students weren't always off-base, but these values were inculcated in _extreme_ ways. For a non-telepath example, think of a boarding school that punished theft with brutal corporal punishment. Yes, theft is wrong. Everyone can agree on that. That's not the problem. The problem is that brutal corporal punishment is _also wrong_.)

The Corps' disciplinary methods, however, typical or atypical, aren't the focus of this essay - we'll come back that later in the book, once that is distinguished from _this_.

By "this," I mean arbitrary abuse, apparently for its own sake, abuse that pretends to be in line with the values of the Corps, or pretends to be "for the good of the Corps," but is actually nothing of the sort (unless, like Bester, you make the best of a bad situation and find some good lesson to take from the whole thing).

Deadly Relations, p. 33, when Bester is twelve: "In the last year or so, the Grins had become more and more arbitrary with their punishments and scans. It should be obvious to everyone how unfair it was, but the adults never seemed to notice the change, even when it went on right in front of them."

Arbitrary and brutal.

Why?

And why, as shown in the very same chapter, would graduation from the cadre consist of the teachers forcing all of Cadre Prime to _strip naked_ and march across the quad, followed by a bizarre ritual involving the teachers telepathically attacking the children, and asking that the children telepathically attack them back? (A ritual in which Bester refuses to participate, because it's _wrong?_ )

Page 37: "But then he caught something, a presence - watching. Approving. The director?"

Sadly, this seems to be the answer. After all, nothing can happen in the Corps without his approval, and the teachers of the _most elite cadre_ , right under his nose, certainly can't decide to buy elaborate costumes to frighten and abuse the children without his full knowledge and consent. Vacit even summoned a teacher, dressed as one these "monitors," to bring Bester to his office in the middle of the night, when Bester was six.

Vacit is entirely in on it. **In fact, it appears that he came up with the whole damn thing in the first place.**

Remember, as I discussed in [Natasha Alexander's first story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11991930/chapters/27130080), that Vacit supported the Underground for years (decades?) because he believed that telepaths killing each other would somehow assist evolution. Dark Genesis says on page 218:

_"So the arranged marriages were your idea. To prepare us to fight these aliens, if they truly exist?"_

_"Oh, they exist. But no, the genetic matching was already in place when I started working for Crawford. I encouraged it."_

_"And the underground? How does that fit?"_

_"Evolution. Think about it. Which teeps escape the grasp of the Corps? The smartest, the strongest, those who best know how to work together and alone. The underground is the gene pool that we draw from. If it were to disappear - if there was no underground - we would lose the selective process. Intentional selection - breeding - can produce faster results, but evolution does the unexpected. I think - I thought, anyway - that we would need both to produce our best future."_

(Of course, in my version, I show Natasha explaining to him that _evolution doesn't actually work that way_ and show him admitting that yes, he sees that now, and I then expand upon the _other_ reason mentioned in canon for him helping the Underground, namely, his feelings for his daughter.)

If Vacit can support telepaths endlessly killing each other under some misguided belief that this would "help evolution" and therefore make the Corps stronger, then it's not much a leap to the conclusion that he also came up with bizarre forms of ritualized child abuse for Cadre Primers - the Corps' most elite children - under some equally crackpot idea that this would "make the Corps stronger."

And in the Corps, the director's word might as well be the word of God, because telepaths live and die at his discretion. It becomes institutionalized and cyclical - teachers do it to students because it was done to them (as they admit in that scene). And they rationalize it as being good for the Corps, somehow.

If they didn't believe that, they never would have been approved to be teachers (nannies, etc.) of Cadre Primers.

It doesn't matter how much of a stretch that is - they convince themselves of it anyway.

In summary:

  * Only Cadre Prime, out of the whole Corps, has "monitors" and undergoes a graduation ritual like what we see in canon. (That's 25-30 children each year out of a Corps of millions of people.)
  * Even though the teachers point out how unique and special the children are to be who they are, and to be undergoing such a ritual, canon is misleading by _never showing us any other experiences of children growing up in the Corps._ Bester's experience is many times in canon discussed as being special and atypical, but it's all we see. (Talia gets a few sentences in one episode, and Lyta was raised in Cadre Prime - she went through the same abuse as Bester did.) Thus, it appears to readers that the "monitors," and the abusive graduation ritual, are actually typical in the Corps (no), and that child abuse is consistent with the larger values of the Corps (also no). (See the second part of this essay for more discussion.)
  * There's another substantial omission when the books jump from a scene when Bester has just turned seven by telepath reckoning (he's chronologically six), to the next scene when he's thirteen (by telepath reckoning) and graduating from the cadres.
  * As I point out in my notes to [Emily's first story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10402923) and [Emily's second story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10412103), I offer her stories as a way of filling gaps and correcting bias by omission, offering readers slices of life from a more typical cadre life.
  * It seems that the whole horrible idea of "monitors," and what they do, was dreamt up by Director Vacit, out of a belief that collectively surviving this kind of abuse would somehow make the Cadre Primers better members of the Corps, and would improve the Corps as a whole.
  * Kevin Vacit didn't have large-scale plans for the Oppression of All the Telepaths (Crawford) or the Murder/Sale of All The Telepaths (Johnston) - he did ultimately want what was best for telepaths collectively, and for the human race - but he was, in some ways, a brutal son of a bitch.




End file.
